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There's a Waldorf preschool in my area
Looking into preschools for Noel and there's one a few miles from me. I'm quite shocked.
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Re: There's a Waldorf preschool in my area
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Meg -I'm in NW Ohio but the school itself is actually in MI (I live pretty much on the border so it would still be only a five minute drive or so)
https://www.whywaldorfworks.org/02_W_Education/pre_and_k.asp
Think super granola crunchy hippy dippy. Very into lots of open ended play, natural materials for toys, tons of arts and music appreciation etc. From what I understand Waldorf schools are hard to come by. I'm not really sure I'm would seriously consider them. For one, I'm betting they're uber expensive and with Noel's speech issues, I'm not sure they're the best place for him to be (although, I don't know enough about their curriculum to say that for certain). Under different circumstances though, I would be pretty psyched about it.
so i think i thought that this is what a montessori school was - do you know what the difference between them is?
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That's really awesome, I'm a Waldorf kid
We have a public school here that uses that Waldorf philosophy, I'm hoping that I can get the kids in when they're of school age.
This is a really good article (imo) laying out the different preschool philosophies.
But basically (and this is a total broad nutshell description) Montessori is very children directed. There are few teacher per child ratios and the children are encouraged to explore and discover at their own pace and at their own interest. Also a lot of emphasis on things like manners, picking up after themselves, self care, etc. And they tend to have all the age groups mixed together. The montessori's in our area are 13 month - 3 yrs, 3yrs - 4th grade and then 5th grade and up. This way the older children interact and help the younger children and the younger children learn and emulate what they see the older children modeling.
Waldorf is about as down to earth hippy as it gets. In some schools they learn to grown and cook their own food, they encourage very minimalistic open ended toys both in the school and carrying on at home, and at the preschool level, they have a more exploration approach than a teaching approach (similar to montessori but not the same). At the younger level, you would not expect your child to be learning to read and write but more of a kids learn by being kids attitude.
Oh, and I guess my shock was well placed. The Waldorf school here has apparently closed as I couldn't track them down at the listed number and they're not showing up on the Waldorf school finder.
Is it the one on Freeport?
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I'm not peaches and I don't have any first hand experience but everything I've read says they start reading at 6. The actual act of teaching to read, reading is certainly part of the classroom before then. Mostly that children should be children to a point and that things like reading, math, etc should come later. If that's true, I don't think tha'ts all that bad. Public schools don't get heavily into reading until grade school (or at least that's how it was when I was a kid) and that's at the 6 yr level. And if you send your kid to a standard no frills preschool they won't touch on reading at that level either.
I think it can be taken to either extreme but when I look at my friends son who is 5 yrs old and in kindergarten and takes home a minimum of 1 hr of homework a night on top of a full day school schedule it makes me sad that he seems to have so little time to just be a kid.
No there's John Morse, it's on 60th off Florin Road
https://schools.scusd.edu/John_morse/, Camelia is on Freeport, it's one of the 2 we have here, the other is in Fair Oaks, where the Waldorf College (Rudolf Steiner, sp?) is located as well.
There's most definitely Waldorf 'weirdness,' this was just my experience at the school I went to, I'm not sure if they're all like this, the reading thing is true, they don't push reading at all, it's not that they allow it, they just don't teach it. They also don't allow kids to write on lined paper, and you have to write with a fountain pen, no ball point pens allowed. They also don't teach computer anything, or typing, etc. The gnome thing is also true, at least when I was little, it comes from the German orgin of the school from what I remember. They also don't celebrate Xmas, it's Advent in January, and you leave your shoes outside for the gnomes to leave you treats, that's the gnome bit I remember. We also had to do this dancing or physical expression thing called Eurythmy, we had to wear special shoes and robes and create different letters or words with our bodies, so like all the kids would be dancing around and it was telling some sort of story. I had the same teacher from 1st grade through 8th grade, which I guess could either be a blessing or a curse. I never heard of the crayon thing, but it could be that I just don't remember. I remember that we all carried baskets with our lunches and snacks, no lunchboxes allowed, and nothing with characters or words on it, not sweatshirts or t shirts or notebooks, etc. We were required to memorize huge amounts of poetry, and lots of painting rainbows, not sure why but we did loads of water colors. The most odd thing I remember from Waldorf was organic chemistry, my chemistry teacher told me that 'love' was a part of every element on the periodic table, as was heat and warmth... um... this was before the high school exit exam in CA btw.
OK the good stuff, composting and conserving resources became second nature, we had a compost bin in our classroom and rotated who would take it out to the garden and dump it everyday after school. I took classes like basket weaving, organic gardening, juggling (PE), caligraphy, cinematography and loom weaving/sewing. We had gardening class a couple times a week, we had an actual gardener that lived on campus with his family, raised sheep, no modern methods were employed, it was all old school. We were required to take both Spanish and German until 7th grade when we had to choose what we wanted to take in high school. It's all centered around the arts, so that's really cool, lots of art and creative activities.
I would say that K-6 was alright, but high school, it's just didn't seem realistic to not teach us how to use a computer. We had to create what they called 'Main Lesson Books' each couple weeks the focus of what they were teaching in the morning would change and we were required to create a main lesson book on unlined paper, and then bound by hand, written in fountain pen and including illustrations. While the books were cool, my college professors would have laughed their asses off. I think the Waldorf methods are cool, the arts and creative parts, but some of the stuff is just a little unrealistic I think, having gone through it.